In-Journey Tips for Digital Customer Experiences

Gathering in-journey data is critical to building and managing a world-class customer experience management program. It provides actionable insight into fixing customer-perspective problems that might impact conversion or retention.

When engaging in-journey as part of your digital customer experience program, it is important that you follow some rules of engagement, especially when it comes to balancing a positive UX with quality insights. If you’re not careful, you run the risk of your CX engagement itself damaging customer loyalty.

1. Balancing active with passive approaches for engagement

Active approaches are actual intercepts soliciting feedback from site or app visitors based on sample rates, behavior, or customer profile information. They are preferable to get a representative sample audience within the journey. However, if not done correctly, they can inhibit goal completion. Passive approaches (e.g. ever-present on the site or app) are easier on UX, and great for identifying pain points on the site, but usually are not representative in nature, as they rely on customer opt-in.

2. For active approaches, escalate from discreet to indiscreet

If you can be discreet and still get the amount of data you need, then you are optimizing for UX. However, if you find that you are not getting enough solid input, then turn up the dial on your engagement.

3. Prevent repeated display

Soliciting feedback every single time a customer comes to your site or app (for active approaches) is a bad practice and can damage user experience. Shifting from discreet (e.g. 6-month prevent repeated display) to indiscreet (e.g. 30-day), based on participation rates, is best. You will most likely find the perfect mix of UX and insight without starting out on the most disruptive foot.

4. Be precise in what you ask (three to five questions in the journey)

It’s tempting to ask everything on your mind while you have an engaged site visitor who is willing to talk to you, but it’s bad practice and can reduce response rate. Focus on the three to five most important questions in a journey. Also, with advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, technology providers like Qualtrics can enable conversational feedback collection that adapts to the customer’s responses. This allows you to ask only the important questions, and gets you key insights faster.

5. Talk to the right visitors at the right time

Be sure that you are asking questions to a relevant audience within a relevant journey. This allows you to gather the data you need to fine-tune their customer journey. Asking questions at the wrong time could lead to false data, which is costly. You can do this by customizing your feedback prompts to be specific to when they are shown to customers.